Jamal Shaheen, MSc Business Technologies

MScAIS SEWN Search optimisation

What's the point of a website without traffic? Generally not much ...SEO is not that hard. In fact, its pretty dang easy. The thing is, it takes time, patience, and understanding – and you never see big results over night. There are however, a few SEO pointers to get you heading in the right direction ...

1. You don’t need a huge website to start things off, 5pages is enough to get going. But not just a single page.
2. Getting a new website into Google should take about 7-10days if done correctly. Not 6months.
3. You do not need to submit your website to Google.
4. You do need to submit your website to Yahoo & Bing.
5. You should have a Google account and register the site with Google Webmaster Tools
6. And Yahoo’s site explorer…
7. …And Bing’s Webmaster Center
8. Create a Local Business Center account with Google.
9. Setup a 301 redirect to direct traffic going to the example.com to the www.example.com (or the other way round)
10. You should generate a sitemap (in .xml format) of your website
11. Submit that sitemap to the search engines in the webmaster areas
12. The Meta Keyword tag is rubbish for search engines, Google ignores it, as do Yahoo, and Bing will soon probably.
13. The Meta Description appears in the search results, and searchers will read it – don’t miss this opportunity to start talking to people.
14. Make page titles unique for every page on your website, and they must accurately describe the page content.
15. Yes, having a fast loading website is important for SEO.
16. But you can…Make sure your images are squeezed and compressed to death so they load fast, but still look good.
17. Only JPEGs or PNGs please. Forget Gifs and BMPs. And god forbid the evil TIFF, leave that on the 4gig DVD.
18. Compact the HTML, nice and neat. No junk code or stray tags in the background that will give the search engine spiders a hard time.
19. Keep your Javascript to a minimum.
20. Don’t keyword stuff your content, write for humans.

Sexy URLs, or, Default Routes Considered Harmful

Most Rails programmers are smart enough to use scaffolding for development purposes and abandon it before going live. This leverages the framework to increase productivity and decrease the amount of time it takes to see results. This is a good Rails practice. Many Rails developers, sadly, think that leaving the default routes.rb file in place saves them time and effort. This is a bad Rails practice.

Don't Repeat Yourself (In Your Content)

Search engines penalize sites for internally duplicated content, which means multiple URLs on your website resolving to the same or strikingly similar pages. For example, if you have a blog, /posts/2007/January/1/Happy-New-Year and /posts/2007/January/1 are likely to be strikingly similar. That isn't a positive thing.

URL Canonicalization

Strongly related to the above topic, Google/Yahoo/MSN have recently released a URL canonicalization standard. All you have to do is generate a tag that looks like and multiple copies of your content, which might exist, will get "merged" if they have the same canonical URL. This is great for times when you have substantially similar content on the website which you still want to present to give human users a better experience -- for example, printer friendly pages, which typically duplicate content pages.